Or does this story dismiss its own relevance at the end?

What about a provision that says you are only allowed to run this software on hardware that I have sold you? Or a provision that says you can watch this media any time within the next 24 hours?

It's unclear at best what effects license terms can have on the 'first sale doctrine.' Hopefully that will be clarified by congress at some point.

I dont think purveyors of DRM systems view them as being flawless. The point is not to make it impossible to pirate content but to make it inconvenient enough that the average consumer wont do it.

Other than, of course, that the company which produced the content wants to sell it that way and today has the right to do so.

The steep curve here is content licensing not distribution technology. All of their current implementations / platforms will become obsolete long before their potential competitors will have a crack at getting the same content on their platforms.

Or the legislation is outdated. AFAIK the big DRM users (Netflix, Amazon, Apple, etc) are not doing anything illegal with it.

Well, sure, but copyright allows the rights holder to exclude users and uses of their content. If they say you can only use access this content on the third sunday of a month while hopping on one foot, they have the right to set those conditions or deny you access if you decline to adhere to them. It feels to me that if you oppose DRM on these grounds, you must also be opposed to proprietary software licenses.

Actually I have read the spec for HLS and it does not specify any restrictions on the operating system, handling of keys, or handling of decrypted content.

The fact still remains - your issue here is with "DRM" as a concept, which is perfectly fine. I honestly don't think it matters to most consumers.

I dont think purveyors of DRM systems view them as being flawless. The point is not to make it impossible to pirate content but to make it inconvenient enough that the average consumer wont do it. HDCP, CSS, FairPlay, AACS etc. have been very effective at that.

How is it any more anti-competitive or anti-consumer than copyright in general? If your issue is with copyright why not just come out and say it?

I feel like reasonable people can disagree about both sides of that statement.

Is that true though? Lots of protected content is distributed through systems that use standardized encryption / content protection mechanisms (HLS, for example). However it sounds like your issue is in fact ideological ("DRM is bad"), which is fine, but just your perspective. I wonder how many of Netflix's 33 million subscribers have a similar perspective. My guess would be - not enough to matter.

So your critique is not that DRM is bad, but that the spec does not go far enough in specifying a standard "CDM?"

It also specifies a "CDM" that must be implemented by all browsers.